Red Dwarf/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Non Sequitur Scene: Tongue Tied.
    • The Cat has some weird-ass dreams.
    • The absolute ultimate BLAM, however, comes from Pete: Part 2": "Seeya in ten minutes?" "Seeya in ten minutes?" "Seeya in ten minutes?"
  • Complete Monster: The Agonoids in the novel 'Backwards'. Special mention goes to D'Juhn Kheep.
  • Crowning Music of Awesome: Apart from the theme tune, Tongue Tied could count. And of course, the Rimmer Song.
    • Also, from Queeg, there's a brief rendition of Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling, sung by Howard Goodall (who sang the chorus of the aforementioned Rimmer Song and composed the theme tune) as Holly prepares for his showdown with the title character. It's only short, but it's incredibly well done.
    • There's also the Western music from "Gunmen of the Apocalypse", which plays whenever the Dwarfers are being badass and also at their Moment of Awesome at the end.
  • Draco in Leather Pants: Rimmer tends to get a bit of this treatment; he's hardly a Complete Monster and certainly isn't without sympathetic elements or redeeming merit at times, but his tragic backstory (and several shirtless scenes in series 5) can make it easy for some fans to over-emphasise his Woobie-ish traits and downplay the fact that, Woobie-ish traits or not, he's still a complete dickhead 99% of the time.
  • Ear Worm: The ending credits, "Tongue Tied" and the Rimmer Experience.
  • Ensemble Darkhorse: Mr. Flibble. Who is very cross.
    • The Talkie Toaster.
    • Duane Dibley.
  • Funny Aneurysm Moment: In Marooned Lister burns books to keep warm, but saves the rudest page from Lolita first. This was funny until Craig Charles found himself on the wrong end of a rape accusation. He was cleared in the end, but still...
  • Funny Moments: Check it out.
  • Furry Fandom: Although it was made before the Internet made the fandom famous, "DNA" has Rimmer ask incredulously if Lister is claiming to enjoy strapping on a bushy tail and naming himself 'Nutkin' when Lister, attempting to explain why he feels Kryten should change back into a Mechanoid, mentions his envy of a squirrel he saw in the botanical gardens after getting dumped by Kochanski.
  • Ho Yay: Rimmer/Lister - the aforementioned kiss being the culmination of seven series worth of innuendo (and several cans of beer downed by both actors).
  • Jerkass Woobie: Rimmer. Perhaps no episode highlights both the Jerkass and Woobie portions of his personality better than "Me2", when we are faced with a second Rimmer Hologram. The second Rimmer is every bit the Jerkass the original was, except he seems to delight in focusing all of his worst qualities against the original Rimmer hologram. Under the belief that he has been chosen for deletion, the original Rimmer hologram shares a deeply personal, and painfully embarrassing, moment from his life with Lister and Cat. It's revealed after he's finished that Lister had already deleted the second hologram as he'd exited the room. The series does often stress that the 'Woobie' part doesn't automatically excuse, justify or wipe away the 'Jerkass' part, however.
  • Memetic Badass: Ace Rimmer
  • Memetic Mutation:
    • "Mr Flibble's very cross."
    • "ALPHABETTI SPAGHETTI??!"
    • "Smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast". Actually mutated within the show itself: "Stoke me a clipper, I'll be back for Christmas. [pause] Whatever."
    • "But, where would all the calculators go?"
    • "Gazpacho soup!!"
    • "Everybody's Dead, Dave"
    • "So, what is it?"
  • Memetic Sex God: Ace Rimmer
  • Misaimed Fandom: There are some fans who think that Rimmer is the real hero of the show, and that Lister is just an idiotic slob. While Grant and Naylor tried to avoid making Rimmer totally unsympathetic, it's pretty fair to say that he's not the guy they intended the audience to identify with.
    • Which, if true, could turn into a combination of This Loser Is You and Ambition Is Evil, considering that over the course of the series it's shown that Lister is really almost as big of a Jerkass as Rimmer is... it's just that he lacks any desire or drive to be more than the slovenly layabout that he is, whereas Rimmer actually tries to better himself in some ways. (He doesn't succeed, in large part because he's a smeghead, but at least he tries.)
  • Moment of Awesome: Check it out.
  • MST3K Mantra: How'd we find a traffic cone in deep space? Eh...let's just never mention it.
  • Nightmare Fuel: Rimmer's insane howl in 'Quarantine'.
  • Painful Rhyme: Blue's Rimmer song.
    • And Lister's Indling Song:

My love I tried to kindle,
But like a fire it dwindled,
Now I wonder when this wind'll,
Ever stop.

  • Replacement Scrappy: Whether or not Kochanski is strictly speaking a replacement, there are still people who regard Kochanski in Series VII as an example.
    • Hattie Hayridge's version of Holly is occasionally regarded as a Replacement Scrappy for the original Norman Lovett version. Conversely, some fans hated Lovett's version and considered Hayridge to be a vast improvement, and so weren't impressed when Lovett returned to the role at the end of Series VII.
  • Scapegoat Creator: Since the Grant/Naylor partnership broke up, many fans have claimed that Rob Grant alone was responsible for the show's early greatness, and that Doug Naylor is just a hack with ideas above his station (citing the drop-off in quality in the last two seasons, and the slightly better reception of Backwards compared to Last Human). To a lesser extent this also applies to Paul Alexander, who took over as Naylor's main writing partner after Grant quit.
    • The problem is that all indications are that the whole was greater than the sum of its parts; Grant alone has plenty of bad ideas.
    • A slightly more charitable (if still somewhat simplistic) viewpoint is that Naylor was responsible for more of the 'science fiction' angle of the show (some of the seasons he did solo seemed to focus more on science fiction concepts rather than comedy), and that Grant was responsible for more of the funny.
  • Seasonal Rot: The last two seasons tended to be highly variable in their quality.
    • Justified: Naylor points out in the Series VIII scriptbook that they had to cut a lot due to issues with the budget- namely, how quickly they went through it and and how little extra the BBC was willing to dole out.
  • Shoo Out the New Guy: Averted with Kryten, who fit into the main cast perfectly; it felt like he'd been in it all along. The ill-fated Americanization put him in the first (only) episode.
  • Special Effect Failure: A few lousy effects here and there, but the overall standard of effects in the series is surprisingly good, all things considered. The main failures come from the latter series (and remastered versions of the first three series) suffering from some rather dated (and still low budget for the time) CGI.
  • Squick: Series VII establishes that Lister's parents are actually Kochanski and himself. Further revelations show that Lister and Kochanski have had sex many times before.
    • Add to that the fact that Lister continues to try and seduce Kochanski after he learns that she's his mother, and the miniseries establishes that they eventually wind up hooking up...
    • In the novelBackwards the Cat somehow having sex...In reverse, (don't think about how that would work.) Kyrten notes that as it was with a human woman it could produce "horrific" offspring.
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks: The reaction to the Remastered versions of Series I-III was bad to say the least. Opinion was mixed on the new visual effects, with some fans loving them, some being infuriated at the concept of tampering with the original episodes, and still more liking the concept, but hating the low-budget execution. However, what really turned people off the Remastered versions was the number of jokes that were chopped out to make room for the new special effects, the ending of "Polymorph" being changed to a much less satisfying one, and Holly's dialogue in Series I & II being updated to appear to a broader audience (most infamously a reference to Felicity Kendal was changed to Marilyn Monroe).
    • Before that some fans did not like the changed opening from the exterior shots of Red Dwarf (with an orchestral version of the theme tune) to the clip montage opening (with a rock version of the theme tune) from season 3.
  • Unpopular Popular Character: Rimmer.
  • The Woobie: Lister in the novels. The number (and nature) of injuries he sustains is sadistic.
  • Woolseyism: Backwards begins with some Star Wars expository text that speeds up too fast for the viewer to read. In some foreign dubs it is accompanied by a voice over, which also speeds up until unintelligible.
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Red_Dwarf/YMMV?oldid=1541735"